Request: can someone with a hyperthreaded quadcore help me out?

As some of you may have noticed, I'm a bit obsessed with the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark. I really want to get my girlfriend the best possible pc for this game without throwing money overboard and that's why I need your help. I don't have any access to an Intel i7 of any kind at the moment and would love to know if hyperthreading has any real advantages in this game. As it stands the plan is to buy an i5 760, but if hyperthreading would give her even a 5% increase, we're likely to buy a Xeon 3440 or i7 860.

So if anyone would be willing to download the benchmark here and post his results on high, with and without hyperthreading, that would be awesome.

i highly doubt hypertheading would help at all over 4 cores already.... no games need more then 4 cores... or even 3 really.

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The logical part of me agrees with you, but the benchmarks I've gathered so far seem to suggest i7's score about 5~10% better in this game compared to i5's clocked at roughly the same speeds. I'm wondering if that's just down to individual settings people used, or that more than 4 cores have an actual advantage. That's why I would like someone to test this on one systems, so all other variables remain the same.

And it would be throwing away money to buy those CPU's for just ONE game. It's the definition of wasting money.

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You might think so, but she played the previous Square MMO religiously from launch till now. Spending an extra 50€ to gain more fluent gameplay in a game you'll be playing for the next 5+ years doesn't sound so bad, does it? Keep in mind she doesn't really play other games all that much and when she does it's usually on PS3 or X360.

The logical part of me agrees with you, but the benchmarks I've gathered so far seem to suggest i7's score about 5~10% better in this game compared to i5's clocked at roughly the same speeds. I'm wondering if that's just down to individual settings people used, or that more than 4 cores have an actual advantage. That's why I would like someone to test this on one systems, so all other variables remain the same..

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If you are getting 100 frames per second, what will another up to 10% do for you?

Check out my thread, the stats are compiled with 2 core, 3 core and 4 core variants (AMD) so you'll have a better idea of performance advantages/disadvantages of adding an extra core brings for this particular game. http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=125059

You might think so, but she played the previous Square MMO religiously from launch till now. Spending an extra 50€ to gain more fluent game play in a game you'll be playing for the next 5+ years doesn't sound so bad, does it? Keep in mind she doesn't really play other games all that much and when she does it's usually on PS3 or X360.

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The difference in gaming between these processors in gaming will be negligible, the video card is where the money is at and FF isn’t even an intensive game so even a low end video card could max it out with a decent frame rate.

And yes spending this much for 1 game is a waste of money, if it was a flurry of games it makes sense, but 1 game

100 frames per second? Dent1, if you're planning to play this game at launch, don't be fooled by the benchmark, it might be a decent tool to check your performance in cutscenes, but the ingame graphics are extremely heavy on any system. Standing in the market ward in Limsa Lominsa, with literally dozens of people onscreen, my 4Ghz C2D, 4Gb RAM and HD5850 systems grinds to a halt and the resulting slideshow is just smooth enough to get away from there. On some of the boards I frequent and even the beta forums, people are comparing the benchmark to smoothness ingame and the general feeling seems to be that a score of 3.000 or higher on the high settings is the bare minimum to play the game even on medium settings. True fluent gameplay doesn't come till the 4.500 and higher scores, so I'm afraid a dualcore and a low end videocard will certainly come nowhere near maxing out this game.

PS: spending this much money on one game might seem excessive, but she spends more time in this single game than most gamers put into all their games combined. Better to compare hours played than amount of games.

Your rig is only as strong as the weakest part and with increasing video cards you bottleneck the cpu

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But I agree, if the OP can not max out this game with a high end video card there must be a bottleneck, the processor is a high end dual core so my feeling is the game is a quad core whore. Saying that I wouldnt upgrade a fatastic E8400 just for one game but its the obvious issue.

Waiting is out of the question, she needs the system by early September, nothing substantially faster will be released in the coming month, so might as well start building now, while I have time on my hands. I'd rather keep her away from sli/xfire as it might just add complications. I picked the HD5850 because it's an easy 950Mhz OC and at those speeds it's just as potent as a 5870 or GTX480 in this game.

I myself will be waiting on Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer before upgrading.